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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 149! Creativity -- The Big Four...
Good Morning beings of the short summer nights,
Today's newsletter is coming to you from the very early hours of Friday morning – that time between the deepest moment of night and the not-quite first moment of near morningness. At the edge of the horizon, the near to full moon has just set. It is finally wonderfully cool in the deep darkness of these hours and writing finds its own way…
In our world, this was the second week of workshops for K-12 teachers focusing on teaching creativity. Facilitating workshops is intense, but so rewarding. We are learning and changing as much as the participants.
After writing this and after the earth turns to the sun, we will be in New York City doing one of our favorite workshops. This is a workshop in Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art that focuses on activating and exploring embodied curiosity.
This week, we are going into a second set of key terms – these are four big ones: Agency, Enaction, Sense-Making, and World-Making.
Too often, we think of ourselves as being the sole agents in a world of passive stuff. And from this ethos, we have modeled creativity as being focused on having novel ideas and then making them real, which is to say, imposing them on the world.
But the world is not passive. It is active. It has agency. Mere “stuff” has agency. Go ahead and try to impose a design on a piece of wood with a knife. It will not happen. As you hold a knife and meet the wood with intentions, the situation will teach you, and as it teaches you, it will form you anew. Muscles and bones will grow. Embodied habits will come into being. New concepts and tools will develop.
So, Who has agency in this creative situation? Is it the maker? Is it the knife or the piece of wood? Perhaps this is the wrong question?
We like to think of our individual selves as having agency—that we’re independent “agents” who, when we think of some action, can then will our bodies do it with the necessary “stuff.”
But creativity does not work this way.
Bruno Latour & Michel Callon define an agent as “any element which bends space around itself, makes other elements depend upon itself, and translates their will into a language of its own.”
What is interesting about this definition is that anything could fulfill this definition — a thing, a person, an environment, an event, or even a concept.
While agent & agency are related, they are not the same thing. Agency, which is the power to affect and be affected, is always the property of a situation. When we carve the wood with a knife, we are forming and being formed by the situation.
Thus, agency is ultimately an emergent property irreducible to a person—or any one thing. It is a relational property. It does not have its source in your head, nor is it something you possess.
1. Is different from—but nothing other than the components + relations that give rise to it.
2. The relations as they integrate into a stable holistic practice give rise to an emergent enabling of novel different propensities.
3. These emergent propensities create/shape and limit the possibilities of the system & additionally transform the component parts & relations.
What components make up situations? Things, environments, histories, habits, practices, tools, bodies, affodances... Too often, especially in relation to creativity, we focus on the content of our minds and a rational decision making process as the source of our agency. But, in doing so, we ignore the very material things and relations that give rise collaboratively to “our” actual agency and the emergent propensities of the situation.
But we cannot stop here. Situations are not random assemblies of things; they are always organized in some fashion. Situations are configured, and these somewhat stable configurations are what is creative—enabling and stabilizing (or constraining) a set of propensities.
As people engaged in creative practices, we need to slow down and actively come to recognize the active nature of stuff—the wood, the knife, our bodies, our environment, others, and our histories.
As we attune ourselves to the active power of the things we are intra-dependent upon in all acts of making, we can come to know agency as an emergent property of material engagement.
This means that how we do things with things—this is what matters deeply to all creative practices.
Stuff—matter, things, objects, practices, concepts—none of these are passive. None of these merely bend to our will.
“Agency is not something given, but something realized. In short, as far as agency is concerned, what an entity is doesn’t really matter; what does matter is what the entity becomes and where it stands in the network of material engagement. The important question is not “What is agency?” (as a universal property or substance). The important question is, rather, “When and how is agency constituted and manifested in the world?” (Lambros Malafouris).
For a creative practice, we need to actively consider:
What does it mean to be alive? Are we beings who just have bodies to move our “being” from one place to the next? Where is this sense of being located? Is it in our minds that is somewhere in our brains?
Is creativity thus something that only happens in our heads?
The classical approaches that say yes to these questions divide and separate what should be kept together. The mind, the body, activity, and the world are not separate things. Our body is not simply a container for our minds. And the world is no mere stage for our minds to direct our bodies upon.
We are always already underway—actively participating in a world as an embodied, extended, and embedded being. And it is the loop of this configuration of activity that creatively makes us, and it makes our world. We are, as Manchado put it so beautifully, always in the midst of “laying down a path in walking.”
We don’t simply have a world; we collaboratively enact one. Enaction denotes an approach to questions of life, meaning, mind, agency, and creativity that rejects reductive individualism in favor of a participatory adventure. Where we as embodied, extended, and embedded beings creatively make our worlds and our worlds make us in a delicate balance.
En-action: to be in and of the action that we co-make.
Often, we can imagine that we make sense of things only after the fact. And that sense-making is thus a retrospective activity that comes after the mere act of doing something.
But to be alive—even at its most simple level—is to actively sense a world as meaningful and precarious. And in the act of sensing, we actively adapt to and engage with what our environment relationally comes to afford us. We are shaping it as it is shaping us.
Thus, sensing and making are one process of being alive in and of a meaningfully relevant environment. Sense-making is not an optional, high level retrospective activity that one can choose to do. Sense-making is how living beings are alive. The hyphen between the two words denotes the active nature of the practice: making-sensing, sensing-making and Sense-Making.
“Sense” denotes both that we are sensing—sensing an environment and that what we sense is always already meaningful—it has a “sense” to us. To put it another way: we are never indifferent to the world or the outcomes of our actions; we care. To be alive is to actively care under precarious circumstances and this activity is sense-making.
Sense-making is not an activity that adds meaning to an indifferent and meaningless world. Sense-making is an activity that co-shapes, creates, stabilizes, and brings forth aspects of the world in partnership with the world. Meaning is enacted in our ongoing living (creative sense-making) in and of a specific world.
Sense-making is thus also a world-making practice.
Sense-Making is common to all living beings. To be alive in any form is to actively care under precarious circumstances and thus to live in a specific way in a specific meaningful world.
It is important to note – there are many who claim to have developed (and even patented) “sense-making.” And while it might be true that they have come up with some set of practices that help you make sense of things in some manner, this is not the same as sense-making. We, and all living beings, by the very fact of our being alive, are sense-makers and highly competent sense-makers.
We are not simply beings that find ourselves in a meaningless and indifferent reality that is “out there," to which we are then forced to subjectively add meaning to it after the fact.
By the very fact of our being alive, we are actively participating in an equally active world to sense, attune, and co-configure it in ways that give rise to a unique and inherently meaningful way of collectively being alive.
In a vast reality, we engage with specific aspects of it in ways that afford us unique capacities. We then collaboratively stabilize these emergent relational affordances into what we sense, see, materially engage with and know. And this becomes our world—our reality.
Thus, we and all living beings don’t simply live in an undifferentiated reality. To be alive is to live in and make a world. This world that is being made is not a subjective, immaterial world; it is no mere “world-view.”
A great example of having a world and the always conjoined practice of world-making can be found in the life of a tick. The important philosopher of creativity, Gilles Deleuze, spoke beautifully about ticks and their world in an interview late in life:
“Yes, so, in this story of the first characteristic of the animal, it’s really the existence of specific, special worlds that matter.
Perhaps it is sometimes the poverty of these worlds, the reduced character of these worlds, that impresses me so much. For example, the tick. The tick responds, reacts to three things – three stimuli, period, that’s it. In a natural world that is immense, three stimuli, that’s it.
…That is, it tends toward the extremity of a tree branch, it’s attracted by light, it can wait on top of this branch, it can wait for years without eating, without anything, in a completely amorphous state. It waits for a ruminant, an herbivore, an animal to pass under its branch, it lets itself fall… It’s a kind of olfactory stimulus… The tick smells, it smells the animal that passes under its branch, that’s the second stimulus: light first, then odor. Then, when it falls onto the back of the poor animal, it goes looking for the region that is the least covered with hair… So, there’s a tactile stimulus, and it digs in under the skin. For everything else, if one can say this, for everything else, it does not give a damn…
That is, in a reality teeming with life, it extracts, selects three things.”
The tick has a world and makes a world via sensing, co-shaping and stabilizing emergent relational qualities that are uniquely meaningful to it. These qualities afford it the capacities for thriving meaningfully in precarious circumstances.
We, as distinct human communities, enact worlds in a manner not too dissimilar to the tick. Our distinct ways of being alive—of being of a set of specific practices, tools, and environments—specific creating-enabling configurations gives rise to unique realities—unique worlds.
All creativity ultimately participates in world-making, either by stabilizing and expanding existing worlds or by making new worlds emerge. In this way, it is important to recognize that:
Well, that is where we leave you for the week. As inherently creative beings take care and be active in world-making – we will! Till next week
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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